• The user is logged on as a local administrator
• The user, or some code the user runs, enables IP routing

By default, all forms of IP routing (including NIC bridging) are disabled. Only local administrators (or group policy) can enable them. So the risk, actually, is minimal.

If you have a stroll through group policy, you'll discover this setting: "Prohibit installation and configuration of Network Bridge on your DNS domain network" (more here, here). This setting allows you turn a computer into a router that bridges two networks. The bridging works only when one of the interfaces is in the same DNS namespace it was in when the bridge setting was enabled, and it works only when the Windows firewall is disabled on both interfaces (never a good idea). Additionally, regardless of the group policy setting, the function doesn’t even appear as an option when the user is logged in as a non-admin. The group policy setting simply removes the option from people who are local admins of their computers. So here's a way you can remove the ability even for local admins to enable routing.

However, let me admit that I wish we did have a way to implement your request, but for an entirely different reason: IP address preservation. Consider what happens when I'm on my own corpnet in my office. I put my laptop in its dock, which is connected to the Ethernet. I never bother disabling my wireless (I'm lazy). So whenever I'm in my office I'm taking up two IP addresses: one on the Ethernet and one on the wireless. Such wasteful profligacy, I know! (Note this isn’t a problem for any Bluetooth adapter, which always uses APIPA in its default configuration; I can’t imagine a scenario where you’d want Bluetooth to use DHCP.)

If you agree with me that this is something we should address post Windows 7, not for "security" reasons but as a good general networking practice of being conservative with address allocation, please speak up. Now's the time for your input.

Sniffing, or monitoring all traffic on a network, is so 1999. That is when L0pht came out with AntiSniff, which could detect many scenarios where someone was sniffing a wired network. How can we be using plain text authentication protocols in 2008? It is a well known and easily solved problem. But people authenticate in clear text everyday when they log into social networking or blogs or other “unimportant” applications. The problem is when they use those same credentials for work or online banking.

We need to think of any application that alows users to authenticate in the clear as broken. If 3 journalists can monitor passwords, anyone can.

Update 08/08/2008 12:30pm EST:

It turns out the attack was likely a MITM attack where the attackers ran their own DHCP server and handed out a gateway IP that was controlled by them. At least one reporter was connecting to his organization’s content management system over unencrypted HTTP and got his password compromised. More details in “How eWeek Got Hacked at Black Hat.”

Because of non-disclosure and other confidentiality contracts with various partners, vendors and manufacturers, we’ve had sealed lips for almost exactly 12 months. Now that it’s been made public by the media, I can share a little information with you and explain why I think you should be excited.

What cat is out of the bag now? HP ProCurve’s network access control solution leverages endpoint management technology from StillSecure’s Secure Access solution. Information Week spilled the beans, so to speak, in Mike Fratto’s recent 2008 NAC Survey Analytic Report. (See page 32)

Now, at this point, I can probably lump you into one of three groups… 1) You don’t care or have no clue what this means 2) You care but think this means HP ‘has no NAC’… or group 3) You know about StillSecure’s success and ProCurve’s integration and think this is a great combination.

I’m sure everyone will have their own opinion- I happen to be in Group 3. Why? Because HP has taken the power of their servers, leveraged a very solid endpoint management tool and incorporated a variety of other management and security features by way of their identity management solution.

• The endpoint security. StillSecure’s Safe Access solution has been winning awards and earning stars for years. You can probably Google it, or check out some of Shimel’s blog  posts, such as this one, with 4- and 5-star reviews from SC Magazine. In fact, just this year (and in previous years) Safe Access was voted Best Endpoint Security Solution by SC Magazine and has won numerous other awards and accolades from various analysts and media firms. They have a clean, user-friendly GUI, a solid Linux platform and a variety of testing methods, deployment options and switch integrations. (And no, you don’t need ProCurve switches, the NAC integration is ready for your Cisco, Extreme, or whatever you have).

• User management. Combine one of the highest-rated endpoint security solutions with ProCurve switches, the #2 leader in the switching market (and Magic Quadrant resident) and the full integration with ProCurve’s Identity Driven Manager platform and you have one amazingly capable access control system. With ProCurve IDM, you can integrate directly with their NAC 800 appliance to offer per-user (or per-group) ACLs, QoS, restrictions or priviliges. Rules can be identity-based, time-based, location-based, or a combination of all. And, IDM eases 802.1X integration by offering users a central management and repository for user settings and VLAN assignments; it really is ProCurve’s special sauce and a distinguishing feature.

• Switch security. The integration of advanced switch security functions, such as DHCP snooping, Dynamic ARP protection and dynamic IP lockdown gives ProCurve another leg-up to fight common known attacks for both in-line and out-of-band NAC deployments.

• Zero-day protection. It gets better, the new Dynamic Configuration Arbiter (DCA) functions in ProCurve’s Pro-vision switches gives customers the unique advantage of integrating the NAC and IDM with ProCurve’s Network Immunity Solution (NIM). NIM uses flow analysis from sFlow and network behaviour anomaly detection (NBAD) to detect and automatically remediate on the edge. In English, that means we can use ProCurve’s NIM to detect attacks and take action at the edge port, such as blocking the port, locking out the MAC address of the offender, rate-limiting, or even mirroring the traffic to an IDS for further inspection. The super-nice part is, all the sFlow and NBAD works on wireless too. (Hey Stiennon, did you hear that?)

• Full integration. Unlike some of the other network-based NAC vendors, ProCurve has done an exceptional job of integrating these features and we’ll continue to see more integration in future revisions of the softwares and as more TNC/TCG integration frameworks are released (such as IF-MAP).

I think the strong integration with the infrastructure and the ability to leverage a mature endpoint integrity will make HP a ‘real’ player in the NAC market moving forward.

Not to knock other NAC solutions- Choosing a NAC is like selecting the perfect wine for your dish- there’s no 1 ‘right’ choice for all occasions. Each have their advantages and disadvantages. There are several that have special sauces and you’ll actually be seeing more on that soon…

# # #

Dear network vendor,

As someone that is forced to configure and implement security on your hardware, I would greatly appreciate stable code and properly functioning features. Unfortunately, I cannot always choose the hardware my customers are using in their infrastructure. However, if you would like for me to recommend they continue purchasing and using it, then the product must demonstrate to me that it is: capable, reliable, predictable and well-documented. If your product is not meeting these requirements, I’m forced to recommend other solutions to your (current) customer.

Stable Code. If I have to spend 2-6 hours per implementation working through your product’s bugs, and then must either spend time on a support call or spend time getting packet captures to prove to you it’s not working, I am not a happy camper because you’re slowing down my progress. Your customer is not happy because they’re paying for that time and I’m not cheap.

Features. Don’t publish in technical documentation that your product, or code can do something, only for me to find out later that it cannot. On-site in the middle of an implementation is not the time to architect Plan B. Let me know before, either through technical docs, white papers, best practices or release notes. I do read those. If you want to bend the truth, do it the marketing fluff, not my technical documents.

Documentation. If your product does do what you say it does, then please do document and explain the concepts and procedures. Examples are good, but explanations are mandatory. A correct CLI reference is always lovely as well. If there are got’chas or tricks, please also document those. Again, white papers or release notes are fine. Having to track down the one security engineer from your company that holds the magic key is not practical, nor scalable. Plus, he may be on vacation during my install, which would make me irate.

Support. If your product is not functioning or performing as expected, do NOT expect your customers to have a current maintenance contract to address a known issue or bug (or an un-known issue or bug for that matter). If they found a bug for you, you should probably give them a maintenance contract for a year… or two. If you don’t let us call support, I will find one of your pre-sales engineers and we will use him or her for post-sales support, which is not what you want them to do. But that’s your problem, not mine.

I believe that sums up the major issues. Specifically, I am interested in security, RADIUS, SSH, SNMP, DHCP and 802.1X functions. Before you add another bell or tweak another whistle, please make what you have works… consistently. That should be first, so it’s my Feature Request #1.

Respectfully,

jj

# # #

If you read my blog, or know me, you probably know I do NOT like software (and it usually doesn’t like me). So, I’d be the first to jump on the ‘anti-software-peer-based-NAC’ train, but I think we have to be informed before we jump to conclusions and hop on any trains.

Mirage’s recent blog post on Symantec’s ‘Silly SNAC’ was certainly a result of a mis- (or un-) informed person. Tim did a much better job on his mention of SNAC in the NWW blog, but all the dots still aren’t connected. It proves the point that sometimes we (as bloggers) tend to write based on a feeling and sometimes don’t dig for the fact.

So, in an effort to make sure I understood this new peer-based NAC, I reached out to Patrick Wheeler, Symantec’s Senior Product Manager for Network and Endpoint Security. Based on my conversations with him, and a pretty detailed investigation into the options and configurations of their NAC products, I have some slightly more informed opinion to share with you now.

Symantec has a variety of NAC enforcement components and options. I’m going to keep all the software-type-stuff out of this conversation for the time being. They have (among other things) the NAC Enforcer, an appliance similar to the other NAC controllers we see from traditional hardware vendors. Just like it’s counterparts, Symantec’s NAC Enforcer can be configured for DHCP, inline or 802.1X based enforcement.

The piece that’s different is the integration of the NAC Enforcer with Symantec’s Endpoint Protection Manager server that hosts the policies for the NAC. It’s similar to the management-enforcement configuration we see from other vendors, only the management piece is housed on a server instead of another appliance.

And, just as other vendors offer some type of endpoint integrity agent, the Symantec agent comes in the form of the Symantec NAC Client, which can be used by itself, or integrated with the Symantec Endpoint Protection Client for an even more robust feature-set. (The Endpoint Protection Client offers some additional host-based firewall features that the NAC can leverage).

So, what about the Peer-Based NAC? Ah, well that’s just the first iteration of a ‘vision’ to address mobile corporate users. If employees have laptops in an ad-hoc situation outside of the enterprise infrastructure (and therefore, outside of enterprise enforcement), then the peer-based NAC can port the enforcement rules set at the ‘mothership’ and enforce them individually. The peer-based NAC can protect mobile assets in their most vulnerable situation, outside the security of the corporate network. But, the rules are still set centrally and the peer-based NAC was designed to be just one step towards an added layer of protection, not as a replacement for network-based NAC.

For now, I’ll stay off the hate train, since the peer-based NAC is more of a supplement to a more robust traditional NAC solution. If they move to a fully-host-enforced product, I’ll buy my tickets…

Image shown is copyright of Symantec Corporation.

# # #

1) We ended up monitoring 205 nodes in the official show network. They broke down as follows:

• 73 switches (Enterasys and Netgear),
• 4 routers (Enterasys),
• 28 power distribution units (APC),
• 5 IDSes (Enterasys Dragon),
• 20 environmental monitors (APC),
• 2 load balancers (Coyote Point),
• 2 VMware servers,
• 5 DNS and DHCP Servers (BlueCat Networks),
• 27 IP KVMs (Avocent),
• 27 IP Power Strips (Server Technologies),
• 1 Master Wireless Controller (Aruba Networks),
• 2 IP-PBX Boxes (Digium Asterisk),
• 4 Optical Taps (NetOptics),
• 1 Splunk server and
• 4 external WAN links (Qwest).

EM7 pulled data from all of these devices and delivered a single view of the data to the NOC.

2) Uptime for the network was 100%. That isn’t to say that there weren’t some device failures, but each of them was handled properly by the redundancy in the network and the show exhibitors and attendees saw no impact from these failures. This is a real testament to the design and build of the network. It’s hard enough to build a complicated network in two weeks, but then to keep it up and running 100% of the time in the wild west environment that is Interop, is really phenomenal.

3) The average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization. This is interesting because many items were virtualized using vmWare this year and yet, there was still a lot of hardware overhead available. (Maybe we should run Folding@Home on the show network?)

4) The show network was busy. By our calculation over 864 gigabytes of data was pulled in and 1.01 terabytes of data were pushed out of the WAN links in the 3 days that the show floor was open. That’s a sustained 56Mbps average, including off hours. At peak the show network hit about 102Mbps of WAN utilization.

5) In the three days the show floor was open the network and its supporting NOC gear used 600 kwh (kilowatt hours) per day. As a comparison, the town of Rockport, Missouri (1,300 residents) uses about 35,600kwh per day. On a side note, they are completely powered by wind power and in fact sell 3,000,000kwh per year back to the local power utility. I’m thinking next year Interop should bring some wind turbines as part of the InteropNet kit?

Next I’ll be doing some analysis on the trouble tickets opened. I think it’ll be interesting to see the kinds of issues that vendors experienced and how quickly the InteropNet staff handled them. Look for that in the next couple of days.

ShareThis